Tag: society

Happy May Day! Workers’ rights are important, and are ignored quite a bit in this capitalistic country (one of the few countries that doesn’t have May Day as a day off for workers… quite ironic.)

Here, it seems, even workers treat other workers like crap. And I don’t think it’s necessarily because they are bad people, but because they’ve been trained to be assholes by this ‘customer is always right’ idea.

Imagine going out to eat, and always being given your food free if you complain and yell about it enough. Imagine getting pulled to the front of the line if you scream and make a fuss. Imagine being apologized to profusely and groveled before if you howl and threaten convincingly enough—this is the state of customer service in America. He who screams and yells the loudest is given the quickest, best service.

It’s not hard to imagine this spreading to other, non-consumer areas of society. After being trained for their entire lives that yelling gets you your way, why shouldn’t someone take this strategy home, and yell at their wife or kids? Or at someone online in an argument? Or any other area of life?

We’ve trained people to be assholes by rewarding them for shitty behavior, at the cost of our workers’ sanity. It has to stop!

No one should be given a free meal for yelling and treating the server like shit, they should be thrown out and banned from the restaurant. They should not get to talk to the supervisor before everyone else in line because they started screaming, they should be thrown out and not allowed back in. People need to learn to behave civilly if they want to be helped and served by another human being.

But until we stop worshiping the dollar above all else, no company will change their ‘customer is always right’ policy–which translated, is really ‘the dollar is always right.’

Even more right than the rights of your workers to be treated like a human being.

In America, you have to pay lots and lots of money to get an education. So much so these days, that if you aren’t born well off, it’s pretty prohibitive. The steadily rising costs of education could be seen as the natural end result of a capitalist society–a product in demand will rise in price. Or if you are the sort to see conspiracies, it could be something else.

Those in power naturally want to stay in power. And if knowledge is power, the best way to keep it from getting into the hands of others, is to prevent the average person from being able to get an education.

The rich stay rich, and their kids stay rich and pay for a nice education, and so on. The poor stay poor and their kids can’t afford an education, and so on.

After all, if everyone was well educated, who would the rich have to exploit?

The plight of the Joads in this story makes me think of how we treat refugees, homeless people, and any other needy people in this country. The family in this story has been kicked off their farm by the corporation that owns it, and along with thousands of other families is fleeing across the country to California, where everyone has been told there is work to be had.

When they get there, though, everyone treats them like villains, looks down on them, tries to get them to move on, or just tries to exploit them for money or cheap labor.

It sounds really familiar to how we treat immigrants and refugees today. But in this story, the people even treat other American’s that way!

Why do we look down on people in need? Refugees and immigrants and homeless folk have gone through hell to get where they are, and then we spit on them and turn our backs. Why? Why do we put spikes on the ground so homeless cant sleep? Why do we remove all the benches from cities and kick people out of their tents and make it illegal to sleep in a car? They have it hard enough not having a home, but we’ve got to go out of our way to spend time and effort to make it worse for them? Is it human nature to be shit to each other? To distrust and hate someone who is at the worst, hardest point in their life?

Rings of Saturn’s seemingly random topic hoping is all coming together, related in the big picture by every thought, every piece of history he talks about seeming to show how humans are terrible, or maybe that the world is terrible.

Aside from the overt bleakness of the historical stuff he talks about, there is a subtle kind of darkness overlaying everything, just in the way he describes things. Below is a section for example, when he sees some people below him at a beach:

I crouched down and, overcome by a sudden panic, looked over the edge. A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible but the legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged. Now, though, he lay still, and the woman too was still and motionless. Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils.

There are many ways one could describe a couple having sex on the beach… this way of doing it is certain to create a strange, creepy feeling for the reader…

Are the American people okay with this? Each week and month and year that goes by with nothing being done tells me that most are.

Imagine a world in which you can buy a tank at your local car dealership. Imagine in this world, that every month or so some crazy gets their tank on credit with no license or training, and that same day drives through his local neighborhood crushing cars and people and shooting houses until the military can get there to stop him.

Well, that is a lot of death and damage caused all the time, constantly, by crazy or evil or bigoted people getting into tanks.

But, we can’t do anything about that, can we? I need to have my right to buy and drive a tank responsibly if I want to. Not having to be licensed or trained or evaluated in any way when I want to go buy my second or third tank in the future, is much more important to me than making sure only responsible people own tanks. You see, if any kind of control over tank-buying is put in place, everyone might lose their right to own tanks at all!

It’s just something we have to live with, in a free world where everyone can own tanks and drive them in public.

Well you know what? I don’t want to live in a world where everyone can own their own tank, or rocket launcher or bandoleer of grenades. And I don’t want to live in a world where everyone owns a gun.

Call me whatever names you want, call me unpatriotic, call me a liberal snowflake, call me angry or scared or call me fascist or call me socialist. But the less tanks there are, the less crushed cars and destroyed houses there are. The less hand grenades there are, the less explosions there are. The less flame throwers there are, the less house-fires and melted people there are.

People you haven’t seen for a dozen years are doing interesting, exciting, boring, frustrating, amazing, awful things. They are making friends, having epiphanies, worrying over tough decisions, and maybe you pop into their head now and then, maybe more or less than they pop into your head.

The strange and huge world of other people’s lives is an endless thing that we can never know or comprehend except the edges, like how you can just barely grasp how huge the universe is if you tilt your mind at just the right angle.

We live in tiny bubbles of experience floating in a sea of other such bubbles, all connected and overlapping, but also isolated. Your world of people is different than mine or anyone’s. Your ecosystem of memories functions differently. You could step two feet and enter another persons world that is completely different from yours–different thoughts, different opinions, different jokes, different interpretations of events, different memories…

Very often, unusually often probably, I wish I could stop time and just sit and read or write all day. Now I wonder why our world is such that I need to imagine fantastic powers for myself, just in order to read all day…

In the future, unless things change, even when we have robots and AIs to do all conceivable work for us that is needed to survive, corporations and those in power will still find ways to eat up all our time with work.

If AIs and robots are going to take up all the jobs (and they will) we need a society that doesn’t require money or work to live. It’s not the society we’re in now, I can tell you that much…

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Jonas David is a science fiction writer born and raised and living in the Seattle area. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, IGMS and others. Additional writing and info can be found at jonas-david.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @thejonasdavid.